"22 Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out. 23 And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. 24 But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people. 25 Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean, and between unclean fowls and clean: and ye shall not make your souls abominable by beast, or by fowl, or by any manner of living thing that creepeth on the ground, which I have separated from you as unclean. 26 And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine. 27 A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them." — Leviticus 20:22-27 KJV.
23. Therefore I abhorred them — The word אָקֻ֖ץ signifies to be weary of, to loathe, to be distressed, to abhor; and it heightens the hatefulness of the sins of the Canaanites. How intensely repugnant to the divine mind must those actions be which awaken the emotion of abhorrence! We have no sympathy with the semi-deistic notion that God is a bare and cold intelligence, utterly devoid of sensibilities. To limit him to mere knowledge and volition is to represent him as inferior to man. If man is made in the image of God it must be that the divine prototype is possessed of the capacity of emotion.
